Both - And
"Sprouting Minds" Competition. Redesigning Isola Pepe Verde’s garden in Milan Italy.
Project Finalist, collaboration with Anna K.Labaut
Our goal was to create a unique space, always changing, challenging, provoking and stimulating; the people are part of the ‘material’ of the project, a group of micro interventions inside a peculiar part of the city. We visualise the new Isola Pepe Verde as one of those projects that gain strength with time, to eventually become an ‘original’ from which copies are made.
Conceptual Model
The project is created as a superposition of two different realities: the “territory of the city” and the “landscape of imagination”. The former creates the base, presenting an infinite number of possibilities. It is an abstract outline of the space and it doesn’t have a specific content.
Then, the second reality fills this void and gives the site an ever changing narrative. It is a materialisation of innovative ideas and the theories of philosophers and researchers of the 20th century who focussed on children’s education and their development. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life as quoted in the movie Stalker (Tarkovsky) and this idea is expressed in the site both in the material and in the fictional fields.
Then, the second reality fills this void and gives the site an ever changing narrative. It is a materialisation of innovative ideas and the theories of philosophers and researchers of the 20th century who focussed on children’s education and their development. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life as quoted in the movie Stalker (Tarkovsky) and this idea is expressed in the site both in the material and in the fictional fields.
Territory of the City / Landscape of Imagination. Solid intersection - difference
The overlapping of two schemes is carried out for two reasons. First, there is a strong importance given to the concept and development process of the project. Second, we were searching for the unique characterisation, the “aura” of the project in its place and time in this period of over-produc- tion and re-production. The new area becomes a bundle of places inside a single space, each of them articulated but autonomous, constantly metamorphosing the capacities of the whole park. We were very attentive to the potentialities of associative meanings carried by the objects and surfaces in their ever-changing interaction, and so our proposal is suspended in a condition of unknowability, almost unfinished due to the infinite ways in which it can develop.
Elevation
Elevation
Model
Landscape of Imagination
Territory of the City
Model
Territory of the City, Plan
Territory of the City, Perspective
Territory of the City, Isometric
Territory of the City, Isometric
Landscape of Imagination, Plan
Landscape of Imagination, Perspective
Landscape of Imagination, Perspective
Landscape of Imagination, Isometric
The programs and site character are distorted, ambiguous, inconsistent; the new area is the embodi- ment of a messy vitality over obvious unity, and richness of meaning rather that clarity. The layer of the “territory of the city” overlaps the “landscape of imagination”, thus creating a new reality which extends out of the limits of the park to involve its immediate context. In contraposition to the explicit desire of the park’s surroundings to be monumental, the new area contains implicit values
Perspective from the Garden
Perspective central space
Model Images
The project can be explained in three straightforward actions: the restoration of the roofs/fence andregeneration of the green areas (DIY), the replacement of the soil surface by other selected ones, and finally the insertion of the different objects and construction of the water pavilion (DIY). We kept the prices really low while creating a high standard and unique space. In terms of environment, water and energy management, planting and maintenance of the site are totally sustainable, each of these elements is inserted in the project as part of its didactical material, and so, every aspect of the space is meant to act directly on the awareness of the park users of all ages.
Project Plan
Rain Pavilion, Sketchbook
Sketchbook Pages
Sketchbook Pages
Longitudinal Elevation
Thank you!